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US Civil
Rights
Act's
victories
at risk,
say
leaders
on 60th
anniversary
By
Bianca
Flowers,
Kat
Stafford,
and
Allende
Miglietta
reuters.com
July 2
(Reuters)
-
Courtland
Cox was
22 years
old when
he stood
alongside
civil
rights
icons
Bayard
Rustin
and John
Lewis at
the
March on
Washington
in 1963,
joined
by
thousands
of other
Black
Americans,
including
students
Cox
organized,
who
arrived
on
charter
buses
from the
South.
The
march is
credited
with
shifting
the tide
for
social
rights
in the
United
States,
paving
the way
for the
Civil
Rights
Act
signed
into law
60 years
ago
today.
Then,
many
Black
Americans,
who were
generations
removed
from the
end of
slavery,
nonetheless
faced
the
threat
of
violence
and "Jim
Crow"
laws
that
prohibited
them
from
voting
and from
living
in
housing
among
their
fellow
citizens.
Activists
in the
1950s
and
1960s
responded
with an
escalating
series
of
nonviolent
demonstrations,
including
the
March on
Washington
led by
the Rev.
Martin
Luther
King Jr.
The
events
drew
public
attention
to Black
citizens'
plight
and
paved
the way
for
landmark
laws,
including
the
Civil
Rights
Act,
signed
on July
2, 1964,
by
then-President
Lyndon
B.
Johnson.
Cox, now
83, said
the
fight is
as
urgent
today as
it was
when he
was a
young
activist.
"We have
an
ongoing
battle
that's
been
going on
for 80
years,"
Cox
said.
Decades
after
the
bill's
passage,
some of
the
nation's
leading
civil
rights
leaders
and
organizations
say its
full
promise
– and
the hope
it
instilled
–
remains
unrealized
after a
series
of
rollbacks
in
rights
in
recent
years.
Advocates
said a
recent
litany
of court
rulings
have had
a
chilling
effect
on Black
Americans,
including
U.S.
Supreme
Court
decisions
over the
past 11
years
that
have
gutted a
core
part of
the
Voting
Rights
Act of
1965,
overturned
Roe v.
Wade
abortion
rights
and made
it
harder
to prove
racial
discrimination
in the
administration
of
elections.
Voters
are
further
frustrated
by
inflation
and
other
pocketbook
issues
and a
lack of
progress
on
racial
justice
priorities.
"We are
treading
on very
dangerous
waters,"
said
Martin
Luther
King
III, son
of the
assassinated
civil
rights
icon.
"Our
task is
to get
the
majority
of
people
to
engage.
Dad used
to say,
'We must
learn
non-violence
or we
may face
non-existence.'
We are
headed
in the
wrong
direction
and we
have to
find
ways to
pull
those
people
out to
come out
on
Election
Day."
The
Civil
Rights
Act
anniversary
may well
be a
cause
for
celebration
but a
feeling
persists
that the
historic
legislative
victories
for
Black
civil
rights
are
under
threat.
"The
past
eight
years
has
taught
us that
all of
the
things
that we
thought
were
codified
in law
and
sacred,
and that
they
were
part of
this
kind of
historical
narrative
about
justice
- all of
those
things
can be
undone,"
said
Leah
Wright
Rigueur,
a
history
professor
at Johns
Hopkins
University.
Black
Americans
voted
9-to-1
for
Biden in
2020.
Black
Americans
have
favored
Democratic
candidates
in
presidential
elections
since
the
civil
rights
era. But
recent
Black
voter
support
for
Biden
has
waned in
part
because
some
voters
feel
disillusioned
about
slow
progress.
Advocates
are
hoping
to use
this
moment
to push
Black
Americans
to fight
for
their
rights
by
voting
in the
November
election
between
Democratic
President
Joe
Biden
and
Republican
candidate
Donald
Trump.
SIGNS OF
PROGRESS
Cox
celebrates
the
substantial
political
influence
Black
Americans
have
gained
since
the era
when he
joined
the
civil
rights
movement.
At the
age of
19, he
was
prompted
to do so
by
Emmett
Till's
murder a
few
years
prior.
The
14-year-old
Till was
abducted
and
murdered
in
Mississippi
by two
white
men, who
were
eventually
acquitted.
He
remains
engaged
in
activism
–
currently
collaborating
with the
NAACP
civil
rights
group to
recruit
300,000
volunteers
in
get-out-the-vote
efforts
targeted
at Black
communities.
The
National
Urban
League,
another
leading
civil
rights
organization,
is
fighting
what it
views as
racially
targeted
voter
suppression
tactics
such as
strict
voter ID
laws,
polling
closures
in
predominantly
Black
neighborhoods,
early
voting
limits
and
voter
roll
purges.
"We
sometimes
take
democracy
for
granted
because
we never
lived
without
it, so
we
become
detached
from
this
hard
reality,"
said
National
Urban
League
CEO Marc
Morial.
Meanwhile,
the next
generation
of
political
leaders
and
advocates
hope to
use what
they've
learned
from
prior
generations,
like
recent
Tougaloo
College
graduate
Blaise
Adams.
The
Mississippi
college
was at
the
forefront
of the
civil
rights
movement,
serving
as a
gathering
place
for
noted
activists
like
King,
Medgar
Evers
and
Fannie
Lou
Hamer.
"One of
the
biggest
things
that
we've
learned
from
that era
is the
power of
the
collective
voice,"
said
Adams,
34,
Tougaloo's
former
student
government
president.
"Our
ancestors
fought
for this
right.
People
that
were
killed
in the
streets,
attacked
and
everything
like
that,
for the
ability
for us
to
simply
go and
vote."
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